Post by Robert Waller on Jan 23, 2024 13:29:42 GMT
This profile is largely newly constructed, but the previous profiles of constituent parts written by those with local expertise (yellowperil, carlton43) have been consulted without plagiarising their exact words, and the paragraph summarising boundary changes has largely been taken from Pete Whitehead.
In the most recent boundary review completed in 2023 the most south eastern county of all gained an additional constituency: Kent was now entitled to 18 seats instead of its existing 17. As the Commission pointed out in its final report, this meant that it was necessary to propose a constituency without an obvious predecessor - and this is it.
Ashford provides the largest element of the new 'Weald of Kent' seat with over 32,000 voters in Tenterden and in the rural north, south and west of Ashford district being detached from the Ashford seat. There it is joined by almost 27,000 voters from the 'Weald' section of Maidstone & The Weald (including the two Tunbridge Wells wards) and another 10,000 from the Maidstone section of Faversham & Mid Kent. Finally a couple of thousand voters come from Folkestone & Hythe in the Saxon Shore ward (Ashford borough). Tenterden is the largest town and would have provided an apt name, but 'Weald of Kent' it is.
The new and extra division comes nowhere close to being based in the bulk of any previous seat. Rather it comprises just over a third of Ashford and Maidstone & the Weald, just over a tenth of Faversham & Mid Kent, and only a fortieth (2.4%) of Folkestone & Hythe. It is therefore one of the most ‘completely new’ constituencies anywhere in the United Kingdom.
Starting with the ex-Ashford element is (just about) logical, as it is narrowly the biggest single contributor and contains 36.4% of that previous constituency – and Damian Green, the long serving MP for Ashford, did seek the Conservative candidacy for Weald of Kent, though he was rebuffed and a fresh selection process ended up by nominating Katie Lam, at the time SPAD to the Home Secretary Suella Braverman and formerly deputy chief of staff for Boris Johnson. Besides the largest town of Tenterden (which only has a population of 8,000 and an electorate of less than 8,000 in its four Ashford borough wards (even including the extensive Rolvenden & Tenterden West), the ex-Ashford territory included in Weald of Kent includes Biddenden, the Isle of Oxney, the four Weald wards (Upper, South, Central and North) midway between Tenterden and Ashford town, Kingsnorth Village & Bridgefield, fairly tight to the south of Ashford, Charing on the A20 between Ashford and Maidstone, and two of the wards named Downs (North and West) stretching out from Ashford north east towards Canterbury. They therefore between them almost surround what is left of the Ashford seat like a doughnut around a hole, although that may be a bit too unflattering to Ashford town itself. The Weald of Kent division certainly covers it on three sides, though, leaving an escape route only to the east.
Escape is not the best word either, as almost all of this overwhelmingly rural territory is lush, affluent, attractive – and Conservative. In the most recent (May 2023) Ashford borough elections, not in a good year at all for the Tory party, they still won the majority of the wards listed in the previous paragraph, many very convincingly: they took 66% of the vote in Biddenden, for example, the same in Charing, 58% in Upper Weald. They had been unopposed in several wards in 019, such as Tenterden South and Isle of Oxney. In a number of wards Independents finished second, and some of those they didn’t win were taken by localists, not rival parties: Kingsnorth Village & Bridgefield, the shared Weald South. Only in two places at opposite ends of the Ashford section were they beaten by a party likely to stand at the next general elections – the Greens, who gained Rolveden & Tenterden West from an Independent and Downs North (Chilham, Godmersham, Old Wives Lees) from the Conservatives. Looking at the 2021 census details for this section, its predominant characteristics include the age profile: all more mature than average, and reaching 35% over 65s in the Tenterden & Rolveden MSOA. The housing tenure is predominantly owner occupied, and owned without a mortgage too – nearly 50% of such in the Tenterden area and in Biddenden, Smarden & High Halden. The professional and managerial employment sector is consistently around 40%. Only the proportion of graduates is less striking, but that is linked to the preponderance of older age groups, before it was so customary to go on to university.
These overall patterns may also be seen in the section taken from Maidstone & The Weald (the latter, naturally) and Faversham & Mid Kent - seven rural wards in the southern section of Maidstone borough. They don’t have elections for the whole council every year, but rather most wards were last contested in May 2023 and the rest in May 2021 or 2022 . Of the former cohort, the Tories held three in a swathe in the south west corner of the borough (Coxheath & Hunton, Marden & Yalding and Staplehurst), the Greens gained one, Sutton Valence & Langley, and an Independent ousted a Liberal Democrat in Loose, the most compact and close in to Maidstone. In the remaining two, Headcorn was retained by the Tories in 2022 (as they have ever since 1994) and Boughton Monchelsea & Chart Sutton was Independent in 2021, as it has been ever since 1992. Both of these were previously in Faversham & Mid Kent (latter section, of course) as was Sutton Valence.
None of these Madstone borough wards provoke significantly different findings in the census details from those in Ashford borough. The professional and managerial figures are especially high in the large villages themselves, such as Marden, Staplehurst and Headcorn, though there are slightly more in routine occupations in the areas neater to Maidstone such as Loose and Coxheath. There are new housing developments in some places, such as Marden (where the cricket ground in the heart of the village was sold for enough to enable a splendid new facility to be created out on the Maidstone road) – as a result the population of some communities has swollen somewhat (Marden 3,500 in 2021, having been 2,250 in 2011, and Headcorn has grown from 2,500 to 3,330 during this period). There are also two wards of Tunbridge Wells borough that have been moved from the Maidstone based seat to the Weald of Kent. One is Frittenden & Sissinghurst (as in the castle and gardens that once belonged to Harold Nicolson, diarist and National Labour MP, and Vita Sackville-West, poet and 'Bloomsberry'). The other also has a name redolent of privilege and affluence: Benenden (as in the elite girls’ school) & Cranbrook. Cranbrook is the only community in the whole Weald of Kent seat that along with Tenterden can claim the status of a town, and it has the second largest population at 4,000. Needless to say these are also not full of social housing or ethnic minority residents. The two areas do have a somewhat higher proportion of graduates than the rest of the new constituency - 37% in the Cranbrook & Sissinghurst MSOA. In May 2023 the former ward was massively held by the Conservative, who polled 429 while the other three party candidates were all in double figures (of votes not percentage shares). The latter was held by the localist Tunbridge Wells Alliance, but the Tory was second and received more than five times as many votes as each of Laboir, LD and Green all of whom also stood.
The final ward, he only one to be imported from Folkestone & Hythe, may seem an outlier. Saxon Shore was retained by an Independent with a whopping 72% share, having been solidly Conservative previously since at least 1973. However the unusual name is a giveaway, for the ward straddles the flat lands running down to Romney Marsh and the scarp which represented the ancient line of the coast: that scarp which marks the southern bounds of the uplands known as The Weald of Kent since at least the time of the 9th century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Weald is an Old English name for woodland, and that still applies to an extent with Hemsted Forest, King’s Wood, Hoad’s Wood, Barton Wood and simply The Forest near Pluckley being only a selection of the remaining or more newly planted extensive arboreal groupings within this new constituency. But the Weald also provided resources for ironworking, brickmaking, shipbuilding, charcoal, glassmaking and other commercial pursuits - as well as the various forms of farmworking such as pasturage and orchards. Not all the 'weald' in Kent is included in this seat; substantial parts are still in Tunbridge Wells for example. There is also now to be a Sussex Weald constituency. However both the traditional and the rural implications of the title are reasonable enough. The boundaries of the seat avoid the large and even medium sized towns that have grown up to make it such a populous county that it now deserves 18 MPs.
The political consequence is that the new seat fulfils all the criteria for a thoroughly Conservative addition to the Commons. Overall if one adds up the May 2023 election results the Tories were still way ahead, with 44.5% compared with 17.5% Green, 13.9% Labour, 11.5% Independents (almost all in otherwise very Conservative wards), 9.0% Liberal Democrat. The notional results calculated by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher of Nuffield College Oxford produce a hypothetical December 2019 baseline of 72% Conservative, with Labour in second place with 14%. The majority is around 28,750, requiring a swing of 29% to be overturned. This would make it the 5th safest of all Conservative seats. This may sound like an untrammelled gain for the blue team, the creation of a super-safe plum constituency. However there are swings and roundabouts involved, as concentrating or packing all these Tories into one seat takes them out of the four that donated electors to the Weald of Kent, all of which become a little less safe – reduced somewhat more to the urban cores of Ashford, Maidstone, Faversham and Folkestone, all of which have more mixed party political characteristics, and while not vulnerable in most circumstances, have more elements of competition than Weald of Kent appears to have on all available evidence.
2021 Census, new constituency
Age 65+ 25.2% 78/575
Owner occupied 75.8% 44/575
Private rented 13.0% 534/575
Social rented 11.2% 466/575
White 95.8% 148/575
Black 0.8% 365/575
Asian 1.4% 464/575
Managerial & professional 38.4% 142/575
Routine & Semi-routine 17.9% 464/575
Degree level 32.6% 276/575
No qualifications 16.7% 347/575
Students 4.7% 451/575
Boundary Changes, new seat
Weald of Kent consists of
36.4% of Ashford
35.2% of Maidstone & The Weald
11.8% of Faversham and Mid Kent
2.4% of Folkestone & Hythe
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/south-east/South%20East_367_Weald%20of%20Kent_Landscape.pdf
Notional results 2019 Weald of Kent (Rallings & Thrasher)
In the most recent boundary review completed in 2023 the most south eastern county of all gained an additional constituency: Kent was now entitled to 18 seats instead of its existing 17. As the Commission pointed out in its final report, this meant that it was necessary to propose a constituency without an obvious predecessor - and this is it.
Ashford provides the largest element of the new 'Weald of Kent' seat with over 32,000 voters in Tenterden and in the rural north, south and west of Ashford district being detached from the Ashford seat. There it is joined by almost 27,000 voters from the 'Weald' section of Maidstone & The Weald (including the two Tunbridge Wells wards) and another 10,000 from the Maidstone section of Faversham & Mid Kent. Finally a couple of thousand voters come from Folkestone & Hythe in the Saxon Shore ward (Ashford borough). Tenterden is the largest town and would have provided an apt name, but 'Weald of Kent' it is.
The new and extra division comes nowhere close to being based in the bulk of any previous seat. Rather it comprises just over a third of Ashford and Maidstone & the Weald, just over a tenth of Faversham & Mid Kent, and only a fortieth (2.4%) of Folkestone & Hythe. It is therefore one of the most ‘completely new’ constituencies anywhere in the United Kingdom.
Starting with the ex-Ashford element is (just about) logical, as it is narrowly the biggest single contributor and contains 36.4% of that previous constituency – and Damian Green, the long serving MP for Ashford, did seek the Conservative candidacy for Weald of Kent, though he was rebuffed and a fresh selection process ended up by nominating Katie Lam, at the time SPAD to the Home Secretary Suella Braverman and formerly deputy chief of staff for Boris Johnson. Besides the largest town of Tenterden (which only has a population of 8,000 and an electorate of less than 8,000 in its four Ashford borough wards (even including the extensive Rolvenden & Tenterden West), the ex-Ashford territory included in Weald of Kent includes Biddenden, the Isle of Oxney, the four Weald wards (Upper, South, Central and North) midway between Tenterden and Ashford town, Kingsnorth Village & Bridgefield, fairly tight to the south of Ashford, Charing on the A20 between Ashford and Maidstone, and two of the wards named Downs (North and West) stretching out from Ashford north east towards Canterbury. They therefore between them almost surround what is left of the Ashford seat like a doughnut around a hole, although that may be a bit too unflattering to Ashford town itself. The Weald of Kent division certainly covers it on three sides, though, leaving an escape route only to the east.
Escape is not the best word either, as almost all of this overwhelmingly rural territory is lush, affluent, attractive – and Conservative. In the most recent (May 2023) Ashford borough elections, not in a good year at all for the Tory party, they still won the majority of the wards listed in the previous paragraph, many very convincingly: they took 66% of the vote in Biddenden, for example, the same in Charing, 58% in Upper Weald. They had been unopposed in several wards in 019, such as Tenterden South and Isle of Oxney. In a number of wards Independents finished second, and some of those they didn’t win were taken by localists, not rival parties: Kingsnorth Village & Bridgefield, the shared Weald South. Only in two places at opposite ends of the Ashford section were they beaten by a party likely to stand at the next general elections – the Greens, who gained Rolveden & Tenterden West from an Independent and Downs North (Chilham, Godmersham, Old Wives Lees) from the Conservatives. Looking at the 2021 census details for this section, its predominant characteristics include the age profile: all more mature than average, and reaching 35% over 65s in the Tenterden & Rolveden MSOA. The housing tenure is predominantly owner occupied, and owned without a mortgage too – nearly 50% of such in the Tenterden area and in Biddenden, Smarden & High Halden. The professional and managerial employment sector is consistently around 40%. Only the proportion of graduates is less striking, but that is linked to the preponderance of older age groups, before it was so customary to go on to university.
These overall patterns may also be seen in the section taken from Maidstone & The Weald (the latter, naturally) and Faversham & Mid Kent - seven rural wards in the southern section of Maidstone borough. They don’t have elections for the whole council every year, but rather most wards were last contested in May 2023 and the rest in May 2021 or 2022 . Of the former cohort, the Tories held three in a swathe in the south west corner of the borough (Coxheath & Hunton, Marden & Yalding and Staplehurst), the Greens gained one, Sutton Valence & Langley, and an Independent ousted a Liberal Democrat in Loose, the most compact and close in to Maidstone. In the remaining two, Headcorn was retained by the Tories in 2022 (as they have ever since 1994) and Boughton Monchelsea & Chart Sutton was Independent in 2021, as it has been ever since 1992. Both of these were previously in Faversham & Mid Kent (latter section, of course) as was Sutton Valence.
None of these Madstone borough wards provoke significantly different findings in the census details from those in Ashford borough. The professional and managerial figures are especially high in the large villages themselves, such as Marden, Staplehurst and Headcorn, though there are slightly more in routine occupations in the areas neater to Maidstone such as Loose and Coxheath. There are new housing developments in some places, such as Marden (where the cricket ground in the heart of the village was sold for enough to enable a splendid new facility to be created out on the Maidstone road) – as a result the population of some communities has swollen somewhat (Marden 3,500 in 2021, having been 2,250 in 2011, and Headcorn has grown from 2,500 to 3,330 during this period). There are also two wards of Tunbridge Wells borough that have been moved from the Maidstone based seat to the Weald of Kent. One is Frittenden & Sissinghurst (as in the castle and gardens that once belonged to Harold Nicolson, diarist and National Labour MP, and Vita Sackville-West, poet and 'Bloomsberry'). The other also has a name redolent of privilege and affluence: Benenden (as in the elite girls’ school) & Cranbrook. Cranbrook is the only community in the whole Weald of Kent seat that along with Tenterden can claim the status of a town, and it has the second largest population at 4,000. Needless to say these are also not full of social housing or ethnic minority residents. The two areas do have a somewhat higher proportion of graduates than the rest of the new constituency - 37% in the Cranbrook & Sissinghurst MSOA. In May 2023 the former ward was massively held by the Conservative, who polled 429 while the other three party candidates were all in double figures (of votes not percentage shares). The latter was held by the localist Tunbridge Wells Alliance, but the Tory was second and received more than five times as many votes as each of Laboir, LD and Green all of whom also stood.
The final ward, he only one to be imported from Folkestone & Hythe, may seem an outlier. Saxon Shore was retained by an Independent with a whopping 72% share, having been solidly Conservative previously since at least 1973. However the unusual name is a giveaway, for the ward straddles the flat lands running down to Romney Marsh and the scarp which represented the ancient line of the coast: that scarp which marks the southern bounds of the uplands known as The Weald of Kent since at least the time of the 9th century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Weald is an Old English name for woodland, and that still applies to an extent with Hemsted Forest, King’s Wood, Hoad’s Wood, Barton Wood and simply The Forest near Pluckley being only a selection of the remaining or more newly planted extensive arboreal groupings within this new constituency. But the Weald also provided resources for ironworking, brickmaking, shipbuilding, charcoal, glassmaking and other commercial pursuits - as well as the various forms of farmworking such as pasturage and orchards. Not all the 'weald' in Kent is included in this seat; substantial parts are still in Tunbridge Wells for example. There is also now to be a Sussex Weald constituency. However both the traditional and the rural implications of the title are reasonable enough. The boundaries of the seat avoid the large and even medium sized towns that have grown up to make it such a populous county that it now deserves 18 MPs.
The political consequence is that the new seat fulfils all the criteria for a thoroughly Conservative addition to the Commons. Overall if one adds up the May 2023 election results the Tories were still way ahead, with 44.5% compared with 17.5% Green, 13.9% Labour, 11.5% Independents (almost all in otherwise very Conservative wards), 9.0% Liberal Democrat. The notional results calculated by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher of Nuffield College Oxford produce a hypothetical December 2019 baseline of 72% Conservative, with Labour in second place with 14%. The majority is around 28,750, requiring a swing of 29% to be overturned. This would make it the 5th safest of all Conservative seats. This may sound like an untrammelled gain for the blue team, the creation of a super-safe plum constituency. However there are swings and roundabouts involved, as concentrating or packing all these Tories into one seat takes them out of the four that donated electors to the Weald of Kent, all of which become a little less safe – reduced somewhat more to the urban cores of Ashford, Maidstone, Faversham and Folkestone, all of which have more mixed party political characteristics, and while not vulnerable in most circumstances, have more elements of competition than Weald of Kent appears to have on all available evidence.
2021 Census, new constituency
Age 65+ 25.2% 78/575
Owner occupied 75.8% 44/575
Private rented 13.0% 534/575
Social rented 11.2% 466/575
White 95.8% 148/575
Black 0.8% 365/575
Asian 1.4% 464/575
Managerial & professional 38.4% 142/575
Routine & Semi-routine 17.9% 464/575
Degree level 32.6% 276/575
No qualifications 16.7% 347/575
Students 4.7% 451/575
Boundary Changes, new seat
Weald of Kent consists of
36.4% of Ashford
35.2% of Maidstone & The Weald
11.8% of Faversham and Mid Kent
2.4% of Folkestone & Hythe
Map
boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/review2023/9bc0b2ea-7915-4997-9d4a-3e313c0ceb51/south-east/South%20East_367_Weald%20of%20Kent_Landscape.pdf
Notional results 2019 Weald of Kent (Rallings & Thrasher)
| Con | 35730 | 72.0% |
| Lab | 6979 | 14.1% |
| LD | 5018 | 10.1% |
| Grn | 1925 | 3.9% |
| Majority | 28751 | 57.9% |
